Bitly is one of the web's most popular URL shortening services, and there's a good reason for its popularity. It has a lot of functionality, and it also integrates with a bunch of different services, including SocialWeaver.

Available via a web interface, a smartphone app, or a Google Chrome plugin, Bitly allows you to insert a link and turn it into a shorter URL. This can be super useful for social media marketing because there are often character limits that you need to work within. It can also tidy up your posts and make them look more aesthetically pleasing when you post them.

There are other advantages too. It can help out when you're using tracking codes (UTM), which can make your URLs longer and even more unwieldy. Bitly also offers the ability to customize your URL, which is great for branding and helps to give people an idea of where the link will take them before they click it.

But perhaps best of all is that Bitly also offers comprehensive tracking, so you can view important information such as where the link is receiving clicks and when those clicks are happening. It suddenly takes links from being business as usual to becoming some of the most powerful tools that you have in your arsenal.

Integrating Bitly with SocialWeaver

And so, by now, you should have a pretty good idea why we're integrating Bitly with SocialWeaver. Your next question is likely to be, how do I get started?

We've written a guide in our help center that you can take a look at to get started.  The process is summarized below:

1. Create a Bitly account if you don't have one already. You can start for free.
2. Sign in to your SocialWeaver account.
3. Click on your profile image in the left-hand menu and then select "Settings".
4. Select "Integrations" under the "Workspace" menu.
5. Click on Bitly and then select the blue "Connect with Bitly" button.
6. You'll be prompted to log in with Bitly and authorize SocialWeaver to access your account. Click the blue "Allow" button.
7. Bitly will be connected to your SocialWeaver account, and you'll be redirected back to the Integrations page.

It's as simple as that! Once you've finished this process, your Bitly account will be connected to your SocialWeaver account, and you'll start to see a new "Shorten" button in the composer whenever you add a link to it.

It is worth mentioning that our Bitly integration supports custom domains and groups. You can select the default shortening domain from the Bitly integration page under Settings. You can also pick the shortening domain from the composer when you'd like to use something other than the default.

Why you should take the time to do it

We've already covered some of the advantages of using Bitly, and all of these still apply when you're using it from within SocialWeaver. Given that it will only take you a couple of minutes to walk through the six steps that are required to set up the integration, it's a time investment that will pay dividends every time you compose updates from SocialWeaver.

But there's another great reason to do this, and it comes back to what we were saying about the tracking codes that marketers often add to their URLs. It can allow you to track all sorts of useful information, such as the campaign that you're running or the social networking site that you're sharing them on.

The most commonly used tracking parameters are:

• URL: The core part of the link before any tracking information is added.
• Campaign Source: The referrer (e.g., Google, Twitter, newsletter)
• Campaign Medium: The referring medium (e.g., social, PPC, banner ads)
• Campaign Name: The name of the campaign (e.g., Christmas, Thanksgiving, UGC)

SocialWeaver allows you to add tracking parameters to your links from within the interface when using the composer, so it's a good idea to take advantage of that. But you might be wondering what all of this has to do with Bitly.

It's simple: once you've integrated Bitly with your SocialWeaver account, you can add tracking information to your links and then shorten the URL with Bitly, all from a single interface. The result is aesthetically-pleasing links for your social media updates which also include two layers of analytical tracking, from both the tracking parameters and Bitly.